Boring, complex and important: a recipe for the web's dire future

"uBiome tells you every single base-pair of the DNA in that little tube"

Spencer Lowell

This article was taken from the November 2013 issue of Wired magazine. Be the first to read Wired's articles in print before they're posted online, and get your hands on loads of additional content bysubscribing online.

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The body contains ten microbial cells for every human cell -- on your skin, in your mouth, nose, ears and gut. This network is called the human microbiome and, like the human genome, you can find out exactly what's in it by sequencing its DNA -- a service San Francisco-based startup uBiome is bringing to the public. "The microbiome is a cutting-edge area of research," explains uBiome cofounder Jessica Richman. "But it can also be brought to people, and people can be allowed to use it." She wanted to give individuals the chance to learn about their own bodies, while contributing to research into the microbiome. The more people get sequenced, the more connections can be drawn between different microbial populations and demographic, lifestyle or health factors. In recent years, the microbiome has been linked to conditions including gut disorders, diabetes, obesity and depression.

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Richman cofounded uBiome last October with biophysicist Zachary Apte and microbiologist Will Ludington. In February, the project was crowdfunded on Indiegogo and raised more than three times its $100,000 (£64,000) goal. Its backers are the first to receive kits, which start at $89 (£55). "It's simple," says Richman. "You buy it, we send you the tube, you take a sample, send it back, and we tell you what's in it." Participants can swab their skin, mouth, nose, genitals or gastrointestinal tract (taken by swabbing used toilet paper). Richman's team then processes the swabs in a lab at the University of California, San Francisco.

Individual results are kept private, but participants can see where their microbiome fits in with the dataset in general. And as the project progresses, Richman hopes to allow people to ask questions of the data that might never be addressed by scientific studies. "Things like, do you swim in a chlorinated pool? Do you eat one meal a day?" she says. "Questions that might be a bit unusual but might affect the microbiome."

This article was first published in the November 2013 issue of WIRED magazine